In children's books, the monsters have started to blink first

The Swiss newspaper Le Temps asks what it means that children's book villains have grown shy, even frightened, while children themselves have become the ones in control. The piece opens with Der Struwwelpeter (Pierre l'Ebouriffé in French), the 1844 collection of cautionary tales by Heinrich Hoffmann. In one story, a boy who sucks his thumb is punished exactly as his mother threatened: a tailor appears with giant scissors and cuts off his fingers. In another, a boy named Gaspard refuses to eat his soup and starves to death. The terror, in both cases, lands squarely on the child.

Le Temps contrasts this with Cornebidouille, the 2003 picture book by Pierre Bertrand and Magali Bonniol published by L'école des loisirs. Its hero, also named Pierre, also refuses his soup, and is also threatened with a witch his father warns will come for him. But this time the child wins: through insolence and cunning, he gets rid of the old hag himself.

Between the two books lies a century and a half, and according to Le Temps, a full inversion of roles: the menace that once belonged to adults and their monstrous enforcers has shifted onto the monsters, who are now timid, even terrorized, while witches in recent children's literature can appear beautiful and emancipating rather than threatening. The article does not resolve what drives the change; it simply lays out the two poles, from the mutilated fingers of 1844 to the outwitted sorceress of 2003, as evidence that fear in children's books no longer points where it used to.